Here’s my first cabbage — isn’t it beautiful? There are three more out there starting to head up, and this is one of those items I wish I had a more traditional plot for — I can see the glory that would be a couple of long rows of pretty cabbages. I think next year I can grow a few more, but the hoarder in me wishes I could grow a whole winter’s worth of lovely cabbages and then store them in the root cellar I don’t have. As I told a girlfriend the other day, I think deep down inside I’m an 80 year old immigrant granny trying to feed everyone out of the backyard.

So I was looking at this cabbage and after I pulled off those big outer leaves, I just couldn’t bear to throw them away. I’ve been slightly obsessed with stuffed leaves this summer. It was Mark Bittman who started it all with this lovely recipe for stuffed chard that he ran on his site. I still haven’t made that exact recipe yet, but I’ve become slightly obsessed with wrapping various saffron rice mixes with leaves from my garden: chard, Galician kale, and now, savoy cabbage.

I also never really understood the point of stuffed cabbage before. It’s one of those recipes like braised lettuce and peas, which I first read about in a couple of French cookbooks, that didn’t make sense until the garden — just as the peas come in the lettuce is also glorious. In that context, of course you’d cook the two together, and what a lovely surprise. So here I was with eight gorgeous cabbage leaves, and some leftover pork braised in milk in the fridge that I was getting bored with reheating. So I cooked up a batch of saffron rice — not risotto but basmati with saffron. I reheated the pork and shredded it up in a big bowl, when the rice was done I mixed in what seemed like a good mix, about half and half I suppose. It needed a little more color so I chopped up some Principe Borghese tomatoes from the pile I was using for salsa and threw those in as well. It was pretty. It smelled good. Next I blanched the cabbage leaves, then started rolling.

  I have these funny little plastic trays from that winter after Patrick died when I ate so much frozen lasagne and mac-and-cheese. I kept them because they’re the same size as these ceramic bakers I bought when I first moved up here (bakers Patrick called “tragic single-chick dishes” which makes me giggle every time I pull them out). It took me a while to learn that it’s easier to vacuum seal things after they’re frozen than before, but I often use these to freeze dinner-sized portions, so that’s what I did with the stuffed cabbages. I did four of these, froze them, then this morning I pulled them out of the freezer and vacuum packed them.

So now I’ve got four meals all set to go, tucked away in the freezer. I suppose if you don’t enjoy puttering around in the kitchen, this would seem like a total waste of time — but for me it was all part of the larger creative project that is my garden. I was joking with my Milk Lady the other day that I could probably have written two more novels with the creative energy I’ve spent on that back garden, but it’s been a really compelling project these past five years. And there’s such pleasure in figuring how not to waste anything, how to make something interesting out of what I’ve got rather than starting with some recipe, then shopping for the things to make it. And essentially, I just like making things. Learning to roll stuff in leaves has been fun. Learning to grow a cabbage was fun. Watching something I’d imagined come to fruition is the whole point, whether it’s in my garden or downstairs at my writing desk.

And besides, summer is over now, the kids have gone back to LA, it’s raining a beautiful slow soft soaking rain today which reminds me that winter is bearing down upon us, and all of us writers here in my little town will be digging in, taking advantage of the cold and the dark to get back to work. It’s my other project for today — pulling out the manuscript that’s gone feral over the past four months and getting back on track.

Stretching out before me. Glorious. I’m fried, and the prospect, now that I’ve turned off the work computer, of having three whole days ahead of me to putter in the garden, get back to my novel, and yes, get back on track with blogging is a glorious prospect.

I have tomatoes coming out my ears and I’ll be posting some pics. I just got a pressure canner so I might try putting up some salsa or tomatoes. I also just bought half a pig from my Milk Lady, which I’ll tell you all about. And I hear there’s some rain on the way, so maybe I’ll go up and look for some mushrooms. I also need to post photos of my ginormous broccoli with no heads — it’s a mystery. The plants are three feet tall but nothing that looks like a head — so my friend Wendy-the-Buddhist, who is also a biologist, and I pinched off all the apical buds a couple of weeks ago. We’re hoping at least for side shoots.

It’s been a lovely summer. My fake children were here for 2 months and have returned to LA for the school year — they put on two spectacular performances of Midsummer’s Night Dream, Lili and I sewed a skirt together as a project that was part of her eighth birthday present, and with any luck my flock of little girls will welcome a baby brother in January — we’re all looking forward to that sweet feeling of a little infant head on the collarbone — and Lili is looking forward to her younger sisters, the twins, learning what it’s like to be deposed by a new baby!

The dogs are on the mend — Owen’s completely out of all bandages and although he’s favoring the hurt leg still, he’s getting stronger by the day. Ray had a tooth pulled last week but seems to have recovered just fine (I can’t look — I’m afraid of teeth things). I think Ray in particular could use a good long run in the mountains this weekend.

But mostly I’m glad that good people fought so hard for us all to have the opportunity to rest at the end of the summer. The Corporate Job is going quite well these days, but the workload has been intense and I just need a wee break. So thank you good people of the labor movement. A break. A small rest at the end of a fun summer. Whew!

It happens every year, and it’s always something of a surprise — about mid-August you can feel that chill in the air every morning — fall is just around the corner. So soon. It was only 2 months ago that it stopped snowing, and now it feels like there’s snow in the air. Overnight temps have been down into the low 40s.

But the hardest part has been that it’s not getting light so early any more. It was easy getting up at 5:30 when it was light outside — and I like getting up so early — it gives me time to take the dog for a walk, get some writing done, water the garden before I have to go to work. But now it’s not light out anymore. Even the dog doesn’t want to get up when the alarm goes off. I’m going to have to grow some discipline someplace before winter (when it’s *really* hard to get up early).

We’re also seeing the beginning of the fall migrations — sandhill cranes, white pelicans, flocks of little songbirds.

Happens every year, and always somethign of a surprise.

We each have that one professor — you know what I mean, the one who no matter what he teaches, you’re signing up for it. The one who you really really want to impress — or maybe impress is the wrong word, it smacks of falseness, of pulling something over on a person — with Wyatt it was that you wanted him to recognize perhaps not your intellect, his was so astonishing that to hope he’d think you were in anything like the same league was ridiculous, but what you hoped was that he’d recognize that you had potential, that you might have that spark inside you. When you wrote a paper for Wyatt, you wanted him to see how you’d tried to stretch yourself, how you were trying, with all of your abilities, to get to the one true point of what you thought about Tolstoy, or Dante, or Joyce, or Byzantine Civilization, or Erasmus’s On Copia of Words and Thoughts. For Wyatt, you wrote a paper analyzing one paragraph of Death Comes to the Archbishop according to Aquinas’s four levels of meaning: literal, analogical, moral and anagogical and saw the text open out into a nearly three-dimensional thing. Something you hadn’t seen before. Something that astonished you.

I spent three years with John Wyatt, at Beloit College in the late 1980s. I transferred to Beloit after a very upsetting year at the University of Illinois — a year in which I’d alternately flailed in some classes, and completely bullshitted my way through others. A year in which I’d been lost on an enormous campus and miserable in the midst of all those shiny suburban kids who were just thrilled to join fraternities and sororities and to vote for Ronald Reagan. I’d sneered at Beloit when they’d recruited me in high school, who wants to spend four years in Beloit Wisconsin, I’d joked. But after my year at the UofI, Beloit looked good, and so it was as a flinchy, frightened sophmore that I decided to try over again, see if this time college might work. And because there was a hole in my schedule, the professor who was assigned to help me figure out my schedule (there’s the difference a small school makes, they actually assigned someone to help each new student) said, “Well, Wyatt’s teaching Byzantine Civilization — just take it — everything he teaches is interesting.” And so I did, and it was, and I took every course he offered for the next three years (well, except for Latin and Greek) and for the first time in my life, in John Wyatt’s classes, I felt like I was in the right place.

It was in part because of Wyatt, who taught me to really read, who taught me that literature is not, as my people had implied, frivolous but can be the repository for great thoughts and feelings and a place of beauty that I went on to do graduate work in English and found myself, ten years later, at the University of Utah trying to figure out a way to organize my qualifying exams. That department was deeply invested in a form of PostModernism and Post Structuralism that I found absolutely at odds with what I was trying to do as an artist — since I was, essentially, still trying to live up to those standards that Wyatt had set all those years ago — that great art worked on multiple levels and was, in essence, about the great struggles: life and death, good and evil, virtue and the fall from virtue. And there I was, in a department that firmly believed that there was nothing that could not be deconstructed, turned inside out, that there was no truth or beauty only strings of signifiers pinging off one another like atomic particles. I was in despair. I didn’t know if I could finish the degree. And I didn’t have a faculty mentor to whom I could turn. So in desperation I wrote to Wyatt. It felt like throwing a bottle into the ocean, but I sent him a very long letter, outlining my crisis, and telling him that I didn’t know what to do or how to go on.

And he called me on the phone. On the phone! This was not a touchy-feely professor. We didn’t have his phone number as undergrads and the rumor was that he was plagued by former students, showing up years later, moaning that they’d wasted their lives and what should they do? So I’d hesitated even to write to him, because I felt like such a failure and such a cliche.

He was enormously kind. He called me up and he knew exactly who I was — it was as if I’d left Beloit a year ago, not ten years before. He talked me off the ledge while validating that I wasn’t wrong, that my instincts about theory were, as far as he was concerned, correct and valid. He told me there was no shame in quitting, that he’d had other very fine students quit graduate programs for exactly the same reason. And then he gave me a couple of strategies for getting around the currently fashionable dogmas. It was one of the kindest and most encouraging phone calls I ever received, and it’s largely because of John Wyatt that I managed to finish that program, pass my exams (unanimously) and complete the degree.

John used to talk to us a lot about the classical idea of virtue. He told us, often, and in many different contexts, that our true job on this planet was to live a virtuous life. “If you live a virtuous life you will be happy,” he’d say, looking up at the ceiling tiles, and then he’d turn on us, that funny twinkle in his eye and add. “of course, happiness will probably be nothing like you think it’s going to be. It won’t be,” he said, looking down at me in my little desk, all snotty after a semester in Ireland studying Joyce, “trips to Europe, where everything is so much more special than here, than Wisconisn. It will be something you don’t expect, but if, Miss Freeeeeman,” he’d always pick one of us, that day it was me, “If you live a life of virtue, if you live up to your duty and your intellect, then, to your surprise I am sure, you will find that you are happy.” I think of that all the time. I thought of that when I was cleaning up Patrick’s affairs after he died. I’ve been thinking of it lately as I have to take on a family responsibility I don’t want. I think of it when my job becomes tiresome and then I remember that perhaps happiness, this happiness I never expected, this happiness that at many times I thought I’d never arrive at, this surprising happiness is a little house in Montana, with a garden and two dogs and my dear friends and their kids and a little office in the basement where I can write my next book. It isn’t what I expected, but it is a good place.

So thank you John Wyatt — and rest in peace where ever you are — I hope it is with all the greats — Aristotle and Plato and Virgil and Sappho and Tolstoy blathering on in the corner and Dante — I hope you’re up there having some amazing heavenly warp speed conversation with them all about what is true, and beautiful, and real, and lasting.

Well, actually not in town, at least not that I’ve heard, but they’re out and about in the mountains. My pretend children and their dad were up in Suce Creek last weekend where people were coming out of the trail saying there was a sow grizzly with a yearling back up in there, and on Wednesday, the Mighty Hunter’s darling son spooked one up when he was hiking Livingston Peak (which is the back side of the Suce Creek drainage. “My knees were shaking,” he said. “It was big.”

The weather’s been so weird this year that the whole season is about a month behind, and indeed, when I went and looked up past spring bear encounters, like the time we got woofed at, or when those local girls were pinned down by the mama bear, or even when the bear bashed in the Mighty Hunter’s front door, they were all about mid-June. Looks like we are about a month off this year … at any rate, Raymond and I have backed off and are taking our early-morning hikes way down on the flat part of the Suce Creek road. It’s lovely — hay fields and birdsong and we can still walk a mile or so uphill, then down … because let me tell you, one bear encounter was plenty for this girl.